Chan's Personal Blog

Normally summertime is plagued with re-runs on television. At the beginning of summer, I was searching for shows to follow as many of the shows I watched had concluded. The options were reality shows or syndicated sitcoms. During the search, I came across quite a number of interesting documentaries on PBS and KCTS, both publically funded television stations. I was shocked, they had some fairly decent primetime material. Usually I assumed that those channels had those dang antiquing shows, as exciting as they were. I'm quite happy that public television channels don't have commercials in the middle of the show. They leave the commercials to the end of the hour which is quite nice (usually).

In either case, I came across the best reality show ever called Spy. It airs on KCTS (channel 19) every Thursday at 9:00pm.

The premise of the show is that they selected the best eight candidates out of thousands of applicants, and they put them through spy school and missions. The school is run by former members of various intelligence services such as the American CIA, and the British MI5. They teach the candidates a number of spycraft skills such as blending into crowds, passing secret packages, creating cover stories, surveillance, resisting torture, infiltrating buildings, social engineering, recruiting agents, counter-surveillance, use of eavesdropping devices and electronics, and passive observation. Each week they are taught a skill, and they have to complete several missions to demonstrate what they have learned.

One of the first missions they had to accomplish was using social engineering to pursuade people to do things for them. This first test is used by the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad, in real life to test their new trainees. The mission was to go a designated apartment complex, and get one of the tenants to let you into their house and onto the porch. Once on the porch, you had to be seen by your teammates drinking water with the tenant. In the mission, you weren't allowed to use physical force to pursuade someone to let you in, and the police must not get involved. There was also a time limit of five minutes for this mission. Pause to consider how you might pull this off.

It's interesting how the candidates prepared for the mission. They had to consciously decide what to wear, and create a cover story. The way you dress greatly affects how much people trust you. One of the candidates was a black guy, and he decided to wear a toque, and a heavy puffy winter jacket. So, he looked like a stereotypical gangster which isn't the best idea. He then knocked on the door of one of the apartments, and a young single college girl answered the door. The guy just asked if he could come in and have a look around. The girl kind of panicked and quickly ended the conversation as she was kind of scared of him, and shut the door on him. Another candidate dressed up in a suit, and knocked on one of the doors. A girl answered and he told her that he wanted to have a look inside because he was considering renting a suite. The girl said no, but the guy was pushing and insisted to come in. The girl panicked and decided to call the cops on him. That was pretty funny, the guy was escorted off the property by police officers. One of the more novel cover stories used was that someone pretended they were on a reality show, and the task was to get on the balcony sipping some water. The candidate promised to mail the tenant a cheque for $1,000 if he won the contest. This person accomplished the mission by exploiting man's greed. Clever.

Last week was probably the best episode yet. They had to do static surveillance on a house full of students. An informant lived in the house and gave the candidates a map of the inside of the house, and left doors and windows unlocked so that the candidates could break into the house. So this was a team based mission where the spies had to work together. One team decided to use the back of a van as an observation post to spy on the students. This was insane in my opinion because they had to be in the back of the van for four days straight. There was very little room to move, and the van wasn't sound proof so they had to whisper the entire time. Even worse is that the van didn't have a washroom, so they basically used a bucket as a toilet. The team consisted of two men and a woman, so using the facilities must have been awkward. If they had to suddenly flee in the van, the bucket most likely would have tipped and spilled. Gross.

Anyways, the mission was pretty cool. They tagged the students' car with an electronic beacon that tracked the car using GPS. This allowed the spies to figure out where the students were driving to. This allowed the spies to figure out how much time they had before the students returned to the house. The next task was to break into the house, and replace a speaker with a replicate speaker that had a video camera and microphone in it. They used that to listen in on conversations, and identify individuals.

One of the teams was stupid. They had a team member break into the house when no one was home in broad daylight. A neighbour was passing by and saw someone in the house, so the neighbour knocked on the front door. The spy then answers the door and tells the neighbour that he was just installing a speaker. The neighbour thought this was odd because the spy was wearing a suit and rubber gloves. Who wears rubber gloves except home invaders? A day later the neighbour drops by the house and asks the students why some guy was in their house installing a speaker. The students looked at the speaker, and noticed that there was a hole in their speaker. They discovered a camera inside the speaker and called the police. The whole cover was blown. The spy team had to flee urgently. Stupidly they left behind a backpack full of documents of who they were, and detailed notes of conversations that the students were having. The teams got yelled at big time by their tutors back in spy school.

Anyways, the show is quite interesting, and I'm learning quite a few things about espionage. The show attempts to paint an authentic picture of what intelligence and espionage is like, which is nothing as glorious as James Bond for example. It requires a lot more patience and careful thought rather than women and martinis. I am quite intrigued.

Spy shows on Thursdays on KCTS, channel 19, 9:00pm. Check it out .

Well, I'm taking the weekend off and going camping. This should be a weekend full of well-earned rest and relaxation with friends. This will be one of the few times where I'm disappearing. So, I'm going to be completely unplugged for the next few days. No internet, no e-mail, no irc, no blogging, no news feeds, no intelligence reports, no instant messenging, and no phone calls. It's going to be wierd not having a newspaper to read for the weekend. Anyways, this should let me clear my head, and I'll be able to catch up on some deferred reading. Lots of free time also means lots of scheming and plotting in the back of my mind.... muhahaha.

The weather is looking glorious for the weekend which is great. The fire ban also doesn't seem to be in effect for the place we're heading to, so that's good. Fire means equals +1 fun. It's funny, the Americans have their terror alert system which is colour coded with red, orange, yellow, etc. In Canada, all we have is a forest fire alert system which is colour coded.

In either case, I'll be completely unreachable for the next few days. So, to my dozens upon dozens of blog readers, don't expect any more posts for the rest of the week. Don't expect any replies to e-mails as well. I will probably come home to 300+ e-mail messages in my inbox. I'm better 250 of them will be offering wonderful products such as v1aKrra, va.1ium, or male enh@nc3ments.

Have a great weekend all. Cheers .